Stephen Applebaum: Culture Web

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To the website ofStephen Applebaum (@grubstreetsteve):freelance journalist, author and member of the Critics' Circle, London .

I started out as a humble staff writer on VNU Business Publications'
What Micro? magazine. After four years of working on different titles in
the publisher's stable, I decided to go freelance. I branched out into
writing about film and politics, and today am able to tackle pretty much
anything thrown at me.I am an experienced interviewer and have shot the breeze with everyone
from Beyonce to Al Gore, Michael Moore, George Clooney, Bill Murray,
Terry Gilliam, Vidal Sassoon and Jesse Eisenberg.My work has appeared in a wide variety of publications and different
media internationally, including the Guardian, The Independent, Time
Out, The Scotsman, The Times, the Sunday Times Culture, Vogue Australia, What's On in
Dubai, The Jewish Chronicle, The Big Issue, The Herald, Rolling Stone,
The Australian, the Sunday Times Perth, The West Australian, BBC Online,
The Listener, Filmfour.com, Total Film, Dazed & Confused, and Metro.I have also been reprinted in several books, including Secrets of 24:
The Unauthorized Guide to the Political and Moral Issues Behind TV's
Most Riveting Drama, The UK Film Finance Handbook 2005/06, and The Film
Finance Handbook - Global Edition.In 2008 I was nominated for an Australian OPSO award for a newspaper story about the film director Tamara Jenkins.In
2012, a newspaper story I wrote for The Scotsman about Robert Rodriguez
supplied the concluding interview in the book, Robert Rodriguez:
Interviews, edited by Zachary Ingle.I am the author of The Wicker Man: Conversations with Robin Hardy, Anthony Shaffer & Edward Woodward, which is available here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Wicker-Man-Conversations-Woodward-ebook/dp/B008COOH2SI attend the Berlin (February), Cannes (May), Venice (September), and London (November) film festivals every year, and I am available for coverage of those events.If you would like to commission me, or reproduce any original features/interviews posted on this site, please email me in the first instance to discuss a project/rates, or contact me via Twitter:@grubstreetsteve.I am available for:Writing/Editing shifts

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Proofing/copy-editingReportingResearchVisit the sidebar on right for links to some of my published work, and blog archives.Regards, Stephen Applebaum

The film tells of a
unique love story between a mute cleaning lady played by Sally
Hawkins and an Amazonian-fish man played by Doug Jones

Guillermo del Toro is
making the biggest splash of his life with The Shape of Water. A
spin on Beauty and the Beast that could only have sprung
from the imagination of the man who made Spanish Civil War
fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth, the film has been winning
awards since taking the top prize at the Venice Film Festival
last year.

Now it is the movie to
beat at the Oscars in March, with 13 nominations. The bizarre
love story between a mute cleaning lady (Sally Hawkins) and an
Amazonian fish-man (Doug Jones) is one of Del Toro’s proudest
achievements to date. He has put his next project on hold, to
bang the drum for the film around the world.

“I made the big
mistake of finishing Devil’s Backbone [a moving ghost
story set in a Spanish orphanage] and going immediately into [vampire
action-horror movie] Blade II,” he explains.

“I have the nagging
notion that I should have promoted The Devil’s Backbone more,
because it’s still one of my favourite movies and it’s still a
movie that not many people know. And I don’t want it to happen
again.”

Monday

Amos Gitai's new documentary West of the Jordan River takes the Israeli filmmaker back to the occupied territories for the first time since his 1982 documentary, Field Diary. In it he talks to journalists, human rights activists, politicians, Jewish settlers and others about life today. I met Amos Gitai following the film's world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

You use the same music
in this as you used in Rabin, The Last Day. Were the projects conceived
at the same time? Did they come from the same impulse? Are they
companion pieces?

"In some way,
yes."

Why now?

"Because the
situation is very bad. We have the most right wing government ever in
Israel. I think it is doing a lot of harm to the country, but I also
feel for it [Israel] a lot. There's a very narrow-minded and cynical
point of view of what it should be, and so I think to myself, 'What
can I do, I'm just a filmmaker?' So I'm doing a film."

You include a clip from
an interview you did with Rabin in which he says he won't let the
extremists derail the peace process.

"Finally they
succeeded."

So the extremists are
in power now?

"Yeah. Yeah."

There is talk of
"neo-Rabinism" in the film as something that is required.
Do you see anywhere in Israel right now where that could come from?
Are there any signs of this anywhere within Israeli society?

“Netanyahu is quite a
talented guy. He managed to mash all opposition forces. So at this
point, unfortunately, the only opposition to the current power are
these dead men. And, you know, I don't think we only have to
believe in money. Or some people believe in machine guns. I think we
also have to speak about memory, about ideas, and also memory and
ideas that move the planet, especially being a Jew. If the Jews did
not believe in ideas, they wouldn't have existed, because they were
facing much more powerful empires [in the past]. So now we seem to be
thinking that only the big jets and high-tech will protect them. But
this is a mistake. We have to speak about ideas."

I saw a documentary
about the Mossad agent Sylvia Raphael and in that a former general
said Israel needed to always be preparing for the next war because if
she loses one, that will be the end of her. Is that something that
you recognise?

"It may be true
but what does it mean to be ready? Obviously you need military power
but also if you have the wrong policy, which brought the war that I
was involved in, the Yom Kippur War, of complete hermetic,
non-negotiable positions, it's not just the jets that will help. So
with all respect to who said this, I think that it is also the lack
of the political vision, the political courage to move forward, which
I think is a necessity, that is the problem. I think what Rabin
understood is that in order to stabilise the existence of Israel in
the region, it has to find an in-road into the Arab world."

Do you think there is
some lack of understanding of the Arab mentality? An Israeli woman in
the group that brings together women who have lost people on both
sides of the conflict - Israelis and Palestinians - talks about
this.

"I don't like the
word mentality. I think that Rabin was different because he was not a
racist. He was a soldier, so when there was a war he knew how to
fight. But he didn't have a racist attitude to the other side, and
this is necessary. If you have the complex of supremacy or a racist,
or you think we are so smart and the other one not, you will never
make peace. It's not only a question of concessions or territory.
It's a question of attitude and what kind of Middle East you want."

Do you regard policies
adopted by the present Israeli government as racist?

"I think there are
a lot of racist policies, racist laws, and I think that they will
weaken Israel. They will make it more hermetic. They don't want to
teach Mahmoud Darwish [a Palestinian poet/author regarded as the
Palestinian national poet] poetry in school, and I think that is a
mistake because you're not obliged to adhere to everything he says,
but you have to know what the other side thinks. This kind of
Sovietic [sic] way of thinking about culture, about education,
intervening in the nomination of the Supreme Court by politicians,
will only weaken the institutions that Israel will need to survive in
this region. It's not such a friendly region, so you need to have
openness. You need to present a different model and not try to
integrate negative aspects of other countries of this region."

Is the way that the
Israel-Palestine conflict viewed too manichean?

"The narratives
are all wrong because I think that the conflict is not between a
group of angels and a group of bastards. I think both groups are
angels and bastards at the same time. And I think the portrayal of
some group as angelic will only prolong the conflict. I mean neither
is angelic, so let's not kid ourselves. Like I say in the film, when
Rabin gave the order to withdraw from the Palestinian cities was the
worst [period of] Palestinian suicide attacks in Tel Aviv, and
obviously that allowed the ultra right to delegitimise Rabin and
eventually to kill him. So there are no angels. Let's leave this
vision. Let's work for reconciliation and peace in a serious way, and
not like the current government is doing - just spinning some media
provocations. I think that this will create a lot of harm to Israel."

You've said young
film-makers are having to sign something for the Minister of Culture.
You seem to be an independent voice who no one's managed to tame.
Have there been any attempts to put pressure on you?

"Well the Minister
of Culture doesn't like everything that I am doing, which is her
right. But I don't ask everybody to agree with me. I also don't agree
with them, so it's fair enough. And I don't have the malady of some
of the showbiz colleagues that want to be loved by everybody. And
anyway, I don't love everybody myself. So I also think it's fair
enough. No, you know, I am just an architect to start with, and I am
into building bridges and against people who want to burn bridges all
the time. I think it's a complicated area, in a very bad historical
phase, and we have to keep trying to do it. And I think these very
courageous groups of human rights organisations, Israelis and
Palestinians, deserve all the homage and not all the curses that they
get from the Israel right wing. I think they're great."

These groups are
liberal in their thinking. What do you think of BDS?

"I'm not for
boycotts because I think we need a dialogue. And I think the
government is applying its own boycott on all these human rights
organisations, so they're not in the perfect position to speak about
boycotts. They ask that groups like Breaking the Silence are not to
speak in schools. They instructed all the schools to never allow them
to speak to young people and for a Minister of Education never to
accept it, and for a Minister of Culture to close two galleries,
private galleries, which invited them to speak out. They restrict
financing to all these groups and closed the capacity of this group
called Rabbis for Human Rights to help the Bedouins. These are pure
acts of boycott by the government. So they're not in a good position
to speak about boycotts."

With regards to the
Bedouins, is what we see in the film, with the school, a consequence
of the Land Regulation Act?

"Yes. The Land
Regulation Act is basically about trying to annex, in one way or
another, more chunks of the West Bank."

There is a lot of
mirroring that goes on throughout the film, which reflects your
earlier contention that both sides are made up of angels and
bastards.

"That's why I'm
not for boycotts because we have to keep the flow of ideas and
dialogues against the ..."

You have I think it is
three Haaretz journalists in the film.

"I think they are
great. They're, in a sense, the only independent opposition now. In a
way they are much more effective than all the parliamentary
opposition."

I think what I liked is
that you have a spectrum of views from them in the film which isn't
reflected, quite often, in the way that people sometimes talk about
the paper. Some people even say it is an enemy of Israel.

"Yeah. Yeah."

Was it intentional to
show that there is a spectrum of opinion within the paper rather than
being just a bloc?

"Sure. I think
it's very impressive that they exist."

One of them suggests
that Israel can either be a Jewish State or a democracy. Do you think
these things are mutually exclusive, that Israel can be one but not
the other?

"You know, I'm not
making direct comments on the film because I'm not for the Michael
Moore type of cinema. Even if I may agree with him politically, I
don't like this kind of documentary which is too manipulative, even
for the 'good causes'. For me it's a kind of mistrust of your
viewers. So for me, when I see these kinds of documentaries, I start
to mistrust their argument and for me it has the opposite effect. I
don't like propaganda, even from the people I agree with. I like
freethinkers. So my films are, in a way, calling for interpretation,
not consumption."

One of the interesting
things about the film, and one of its ironies, is that the way people
in it talk about the settlers we're expecting them to be foaming
extremists when we meet them at the end. But the two young women you
speak to effectively embody the spirit of Rabin. One was stabbed
and still wants to be able to live with Palestinians. Rabin talks
about reaching out to the enemy and that is exactly what she wants to
do.

﻿"Exactly
[agreeing that they embody the spirit of Rabin]. So that's why I
think we have to collect contradictions. If we want, really, to bring
change, we have to speak to everybody. And we have to solicit forces
wherever we find them if we want to create this change and not pre
judge, and speak openly and refuse racist tendencies which are in
this current government. But also do the same judgement on
ourselves."

The settlers are often
regarded as a barrier to peace. Do you see them that way?

"Again, I'm not
going to give you my political solution unless I'm elected with a
vast majority of the Israeli people. Then I have a very clear
programme."

Would you ever run for
office?

"No."

You prefer the
independence of being a filmmaker?

"Absolutely."

West of the Jordan
River will screen at the ICA on November 23rd, followed by a Q
& A with Amos Gitai

"Your piece is one of the most comprehensive, eloquent, and powerful discussions of the film I have read." Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The Act of Killing

"Stephen, this is a fabulous piece; you did a superlative job in communicating the film and its essence." Erik Greenberg Anjou, director of Deli Man

"I have to thank you. It's a very good [Mein Kampf] article, which you have written; it reflects very sharply and especially fairly the various positions." Dr. Christian Hartmann, Institute of Contemporary History Munich